I have an article where the abstract is written in english but the article otherwise is in french-canadian. It would be nice to be able to read the entire article so that I can critique it effectively for my viva prep, although from the absract there are some obvious weaknesses. Is there an easy way to get a translation of the article?

Have you tried google translate? There is often an option if the document is in a foreign language when you search for it? I find this quite helpful and better than getting out a big dictionary! Or there is an add-on in Firefox which has a translator called FoxLingo though I've never tried it for an article but it does phrases, words etc.

Good luck (up)

Google translate is an option although it's not always 100% reliable. My daughter is doing french in university and though she says loads of them use it :$ when they are pressed for time [read when they have left their assignments 'til the last minute!] she says that often its translation is too literal.

From my extremely limited knowledge of your subject area Dunni, through sending you a couple of articles in the past, even google translate might struggle! Have you tried the author's university website bio? Maybe a french and english version might be available there. Or the journal publisher's website - maybe there are english and french options available there - worth a shot?

Thanks Doodles and Ady, I think that the technicalities of the article may be problematic for translation without losing the meaning via google or Firefox. I have had a personal friend translate a different article (dif language) but don't know anyone to translate this one! Would it be a problem at viva to have an article cited based on the english abstract without reading the whole thing? Not sure how best to deal with that!

No I don't think that matters as I have done that for articles and some reports in a foreign language. Though for your piece of mind it's better to read the whole article to get the details but a good abstract should summarise that for you. I had to go hunting through some reports for information which is very consuming to sit and translate what you think are the relevant parts.

Well, I am currently in the process of working through the google translation of the PDF article. It is a rather slow process as some of the 'e' are expressed as '6' along with some other oddities etc. I am hoping to get a general feel for the article via this route, but I suppose the examiners won't have a translation with any luck lol :p